


A wing can cover all sorts of things

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M, M/M, sin fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-27
Updated: 2011-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 17:54:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can tie a knot in a cherry stem.  He can tell you about Leif Erikson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A wing can cover all sorts of things

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tw_lucky_7, first sin on the board: Pride. Chosen character: Ianto Jones. Thanks to planejane for totes turning me on to this comm. Also, this thing is laced with lines from the Flobots' "Handlebars". Laced like coke and baby powder. Unbetaed. Just trying on some thinky stuff that might not even work. Title from Tori Amos's "Sister Janet".

It's the suit, and the tie and the coffee. It's impeccable. It's hard not to see why Jack is pulled to him whenever he ventures down out of the tourist information centre and into the Hub proper, tray of coffees in hand, maybe some paperwork to sign. He knows when Jack needs biscuits, when he needs 19-HBG refill forms for the ammunition requisition process. He can count the numbers of steps from the kitchenette to Jack's office (fifty-three when loaded down, thirty-nine when there's a spring of self-assurance in this wing tips: polished).

Jack calls him, "my man Friday", and he'd had to look it up, but now that he knows, he can play it to the fullest, and that's an accomplishment in and of itself. He's the music in the background of the Hub, the blue colouring on the walls that calms and comforts the inhabitants without them ever knowing.

He can tie a knot in a cherry stem. He can tell you about Leif Erikson.

He hadn't counted on actually having to deliver the blow jobs and all that, but well, penny-pound, greater good, he'd bought a Joy of Gay Sex and tried to figure out creative ways to live up to the advice Cosmo had given Lisa: 'If you keep it fresh and innovative in the bedroom, his eyes will never stray!' He can make Jack want to buy his product. Ianto likes that he can direct Jack's eyes wherever he wants them, because sometimes he has to be moving heavy machinery or speak in broken Japanese over the phone.

So it's coffee and suits and leaflets and smiles for tourists. It's musak and environmental mood setting and take-away steaming hot and fresh, cartons already opened like the flower petals you missed blooming in the early morning. Forms and guns and chaps and leather cock rings and the occasional Mars bar.

Everything is perfect, and it's not a façade, because it doesn't need to be. This does not discount the motives behind the perfection, but the actions in and of themselves, he thinks, are flawless and worth doing, even if Lisa wasn't in the basement.

She's on the wheel downstairs, see, and she needs him. Not like Jack needs him or Tad had needed him or the way Tosh needs him to unspool the wire from his hands in an orderly fashion like a knitting accomplice. She needs him _to live_ , and isn't that terrifying and also not completely unsweet? She's needed him before for sex and jokes and companionship, and now she can't even shit in a toilet by herself.

He sees the strings that control her systems.

He changes her colostomy bag, and her catheter bag--he changes that too, pulling at the metal trappings of her cyberised suit and realising that the Cybermen hadn't thought this whole thing through. They should have stuck to transplanting brains, because in their panic they must not have considered humans and their excretions. He's had to switch out the plating over her crotch several times, rust and the like. Anyone monitoring his internet searches upstairs must think he has a kink for medieval chastity devices.

He finds that he doesn't mind. After all, this is what love is, and he'd thought that he'd probably be doing this when she was ninety and not twenty-three, but it's love, right?

Besides, no one else would do it. Not her parents, or Torchwood, or UNIT, good god they'd've put a bullet in her skull without stopping to think about the fact that she's a person in there, not a robot stripped of all emotions, limbic system fried and hot-wired. She's a real thinking human who just happens to have a few machine parts, mostly on the outside, but some on the inside, and those are the things that Ianto will fix, repair, turn for good like—

He doesn't have a comparison for that.

She likes to listen to him tell her stories of the world above, a Morlock to his Eloi, and it's easy when her hand squeezes his to think that his cause is noble. Like Arthur or Merlin, or Charlemagne. No, no, not Charlemagne. Like Nobel himself, making dynamite and then inspiring generations to declare peace. That's him. He's making Lisa a better thing, helping her live, fixing her, because then the world will be a better place with her in it.

And he'll have her again, and all the things he's done will be worth it. He's just bettering himself really, with the suits and the coffee and the independent study. When she is cured, not even Ianto knows what she'll be like, they both get that. But he'll be different too, it will all be strange and new, and they will walk hand in hand up to the atrium level and show the others. It will be a perfect ending, really.

 _This is Lisa._

 _Ianto fixed me._

 _We're in love._

 _He saved my life._

 _She owes me everything._

 _I owe him everything._

 _We're leaving now._

 _Good bye._

END


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